Doreen Carvajal, German publishers' Google challenge, International Herald Tribune, June 5, 2005. Excerpt: 'When the online retailer Amazon.com came calling a year ago to sign up German publishers for a digital indexing project, one book executive urged a strategy of polite rebuffs. Then this year, when Google started wooing publishers to sign on for its own digital book project, that German executive, Matthias Ulmer, decided the time was ripe to seize control with a homegrown counterattack. Now Ulmer and a five-member task force of the German book trade association Börsenverein are organizing their own digital indexing project, Volltextsuche Online....The German project includes some publishing industry heavyweights like Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, a Stuttgart-based media group. But it still faces a test of membership reaction at a general assembly of the association on June 17 in Berlin. The trade association is not putting the idea to a vote but will essentially gather feedback...."There's been some misunderstanding and misconceptions about what Google is doing," said [Stefan Keuchel, a spokesman for Google Germany], "so we are trying to be open for discussion with publishers. And so far, we've been seeing very high interest from German publishers who want to talk to us."..."Discussion is completely about titles still under copyright," said [Matthias Ulmer, a German publisher].'
Also see Gary Price's article on the same project in the June 5 issue of SearchDay.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/06/2005 10:10:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
